Blog

I still can’t read music but I can parse it a lot more efficiently now. Thanks to the help of the good folks at MuseScore, creating new editions of Off the Staff is now much more streamlined. Since my first attempts at visualizing music, I learned of new methods for making the images and even how to animate them.

Generating color palettes of more than 4,600 covers of The New Yorker was a challenging task but when I get an idea stuck in my head I stubbornly like to see it through. What follows is a breakdown of how I made my Color Palettes of The New Yorker project including early ideas, methodologies, and technical details.

Literary Constellations is a series of posters designed to resemble constellation maps but instead of being based on real stars, the shapes are based on first sentences from chapters of short classic stories.

I can’t read music but I can parse it. The talent of reading music has always escaped me which is a little ironic considering I grew up in a musical family. However, I’ve always enjoyed how sheet music looks so I took a shot at visualizing the notes from musical scores and the result is a series of posters called Off the Staff.

With so many options available for visualizing weather, settling on one for my Weather Portraits poster was a challenge, but a fun one. Over the course of three weeks, I experimented with dozens of ideas—most of which are documented here for people like me who like that sort of thing and to hopefully spark some future ideas for others.

During the few weeks it took to create my Colors of World Flags poster, I went through several iterations and ideas before settling on the final product. Experimenting with these ideas was as much fun as working on the end result and I thought others would enjoy seeing the path I took.

I've been overwhelmed by the positive reaction to my National Parks of the United States poster. I want to thank everyone for such kind words. I also want to thank everyone who shared it with others. Several people have asked how I made it so I'll outline process, list my sources and show a few early prototypes as an extra bonus.

Continuing my latest obsession with data visualization, I had some fun with public transportation data. In an attempt to play around with a new color palette and put a different face on old data, I wound up creating what I call Transit Charts.

When I heard that Metra was planning to cut 46 trains from its service in 2012 to make up for high operating costs, I wanted to see just how much of an impact that would have on their schedules—using a technique from 1885. How the final result came about was a mixture of curiosity and fun with a pinch of obsession.

Ever since I found out I could block ads, I have. I've even gone out of my way to download Firefox extensions like Stylish to let me write my own styles that block ads not caught by AdBlock. I popped over to NBC Chicago's weather page to see the forecast for tonight and was painfully reminded that I had forgotten to re-enable AdBlock after disabling it for another project.